All About Web Innovations

Graphic design is an aesthetic and professional craft which necessitates tailoring graphics for visual communication and its presentational aspects. Graphic designers employ typography, layout and artistic proficiencies to bring forth their oeuvre. Some of the more familiar uses of graphics include magazines, adverts and product promotional materials. The graphic of any subject matter must integrate the commercial goals and strategy of an organization, the output abilities, and the budget restrictions of the promoter.

For a designer new thoughts & ideas can come by way of experimenting with modern tools and techniques. These days’ computers have become an essential tool in the design business. Computers and software applications are more often than not, seen by imaginative professionals as hard-hitting production tools than other conventional methods. Internet & other technological innovations have made it easy to get any kind of graphic design help as World Wide Web is laded with the information to simplify the graphic designers’ job. But with all the technology at your disposal, the buttoned-down mind is still be the most significant graphic design tool available to you as this art requires sound judgment and creativity. The method of presentation which includes medium & its expressive style are some of the others factors that are equally important to the design. The right development and presentation tools can considerably alter how an audience embraces a project.

Organizations these days are also outsourcing design projects for obtaining cost benefits as they believe that an idea is not limited by geographical boundaries and can present itself from anyone & anywhere. The benefits & possibilities of this user-centric approach to graphic are immense and hence such community-based design challenges are the way forward for most new-age graphic designers. The graphic challenge requires design professionals who can implement the graphic design maxims to each graphic art component separately as well as to the final piece. The challenge is open to in-house design staffs, marketing or advertising agencies, art studios & free-lance artists from around the world. This graphic challenge may demand the interpretation and exhibition of existing text or some pre-existing imagery or visual ex cogitated by the graphic designer and also require the graphic artist to be comfortable in working with diverse mediums with lots of experimentation.

I have my own unique model of Innovation which helps with obtaining ‘buy in’ and best of all, it leads to a method of measuring the capacity to innovate which is a much more sensitive measure than waiting for KPIs to change. I had been puzzling for a while about how to model the spread of Innovation and the transfer of knowledge as well as other issues such as communication and trust. Little did I know that I had already considered this without really understanding.

Recently, I attended a talk by Dr Kelly Page of Cardiff University about New Media and Web 2.0. I became particularly excited by some of the concepts and analysis surrounding Social Media such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

In an (ideal) Innovation culture there is little or no hierarchy and knowledge flows at varying rates and often ‘on demand’. There are groups of interest and depending on technology, trust relationships can also be built. Rather than humans adapting to technology (remember the first mobile phones, the birth of the Internet), technology is now being developed to match and mimic the behaviour of groups of people in a social environment.

Analysis of this behaviour is interesting. Looking at traffic on say Twitter, a group interested in a particular topic will have what looks like random connections. These are not random and are built upon interest, trust and knowledge amongst other things. Within Organisational Development we might say that these connections do not map onto an organisational structure chart but map onto informal advice, trust and communications networks.

So interactions within Social Media look like those in an ideal Innovation culture, and playing with this idea we can adapt our model for a range of situations. But these changes are incremental. We know that introducing certain technologies into society often changes society itself (electricity, telephone, motor car) so will introducing technologies such as Social Media actually lead to changes in society and in particular our businesses?

The answer is most definitely yes. By trying extreme versions of our new model we can safely say that hierarchies will die and that concepts such as vision and values will truly have shared ownership. Ultimately it will make our businesses more profitable as those working in them will be empowered and will all share responsibility for success. Those who cling onto the old hierarchies will find themselves bypassed in advice, trust and communications networks, they will be lonely. Watch this space for new developments (or should I say MySpace?).

The Internet is constantly evolving and changing, with new terms being bandied about every single minute of every single day. One of those mainstream terms is Web 2.0 Marketing. As the Internet evolves into what we call Web 2.0 and new technologies begin to take over the old, it can vastly change the way that we communicate online. So what does this mean for the business industry? Make sure you take advantage of these tools to get the word out about your product and reach new markets. Continue reading, and you will find out how Web 2.0 Marketing can help you build a bigger and better business; we will show you how it really works to help you realize real results.

In order to make the best use of Web 2.0 as part of a marketing strategy, you need to know what it is. There has been much discussion generated on the benefits of being able to use this new technology in its many applications. The bottom line is that Web 2.0 is a step up from Web 1.0 because it allows people to interact more freely. It makes it possible to have “instant” feedback. Networking, discovery, and social media arose as a direct result. RSS feeds, commenting, etc, in other words blogging platforms, advanced the concept to a higher plane. Permitting everyone connected to the Internet to gain a little stake in the Internet for themselves personally, Web 2.0 became powerful in a relatively little span of time. Publishing your own content and letting people access was no longer a big deal. With your information now able to be entered into various Web 2.0 sites, a huge blast in online enterprise resulted. Individuals can interact in many different ways on these web-pages, adding comments and blogging, and even committing to your streaming feeds. Due to this innovation there have been many changes in the way online business is done.

What makes Web 2.0 especially effective for marketing purposes is the contact it allows you with your customers. Being able to comment on your sites allows you to really gauge the popular opinion and wants and needs of your target audience. You will not only be able to keep up to date with your customers wants and needs, but healthy discussion on your site will help the site to climb search rankings. Google, Yahoo, Bing, they all love fresh content and if your site can offer it, then it can lead to high rankings. User generated content is practically free content which will help you climb the rankings. Such comments will hold a variety of keywords and will help promote your site in search engines for any amount of subject matter.

Keep your customers and visitors filled in with RSS feeds, maintaining a level of interest in your site. This makes your site “sticky” or gives your visitors a reason to keep coming back. RSS feeds can also be used to produce backlinks, all the time helping to improve your search engine rankings. You will get more search engine hits the greater the amount of backlinks your have.

If you take the time to understand the right way to use Web 2.0 as a part of your online marketing campaign you can get some really amazing results. Many people don’t understand the immense benefits you get from running your own Web 2.0 marketing campaigns. Regardless of whether or not you’ve attempted it, you should try to get out of your comfort zone and try a new method of traffic generation. The times are changing, and you have to keep up with them. In order for you to stay one step ahead of the competition and do it with ease, you will need to grasp at all the new promotional technologies and experiment with its new techniques.

In considering how to extend the Web with new technologies, it is instructive to compare Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) with frames. CSS is an elegantly designed extension, whereas frames suck, as I have said many times CSS is backward compatibleto the extent that viewing a style-enhanced site with an older browser causes no problems at all. Of course, the user doesn’t see the stylistic enhancements made possible by CSS (e.g., multiple fonts and indented margins), but the text of the page will be readable and will be presented in a reasonable default style (of course, the extent to which you deem the default presentation reasonable depends on your assessment of the quality of typography in mainstream browsers: admittedly rather poor). In contrast, a page designed with frames is useless for a user with an old browser.CSS isorthogonal to other featuresin Web browsing. When multiple style sheets become supported in future releases of the mainstream browsers, users might want to learn the command to switch between styles, but they won’t have to. Read the rest of this entry »

How do you produce ideas for new innovations? Here is a great technique: Extract some basic ideas from existing products and inventions, and then apply them to new areas.

If you look at a thermostat, for example, you might think “A device to control the indoor climate.” This is certainly an idea that can be used to come up with something new. You have to look a little deeper, though, if you want more creative innovations. Continue with, “It measures the temperature and then, using that information, turns the heater on or off, to keep the house comfortable.”

Continuing even deeper, we see that it uses measurement in order to control something. Let’s work with that concept. With the technology that exists today, we can make things happen automatically, according to almost anything we can automatically measure. This is a powerful concept that can and will lead to some fantastic new innovations.

In an article on thought control, I pointed out that since we can measure the changing activity of the brain as we change the nature of our thoughts, we can already build a device that is operated just by our thoughts. Even with the technology of thirty years ago, we could have had a TV turn on whenever one’s pulse rate increased. If you then trained yourself to increase your pulse rate by thinking certain thoughts, you could turn on a television with your thoughts.

Other New Innovations

To have many such ideas and new innovations, just look around and start applying the basic concept of control by measurement. Looking at the television, and thinking of measurable things related to it, time is an obvious one. There are “sleep timers” that turn the TV off after a certain amount of time, but how about a device that only allows the TV to be on for three hours in any given day? Kids can watch when they want, but they won’t be able to watch too much.

A thermometer gives me the idea for a sign that changes it’s message according to the weather. A restaurant, for example, could have the sign say “Come in out of the cold,” when it was cold, or “Cool off with an ice cold drink,” when it was hot, and so on. I’m sure there are other businesses whose messages would be variously more or less effective according to the weather.

When I look at the traffic, I see that speed can be measured. There are already those radar signs now, that tell you how fast you are going. There could be a sign down the road that says “Slow down, we’re taking your picture,” or the radar gun could turn on a fake siren whenever someone goes ten miles per hour over the limit. The idea is simply that their speed triggers something that will hopefully slow them down.

Yesterday I saw a new invention that measures your girth. So what does it do with that information? Well, if you hold your stomach in, you get clear sound in your headphones. If you let your stomach hang out, the music is low quality and loses volume. While I’m not sure how well this stomach-exercise-motivator will sell, it does show how using the concept of measurement to control can lead to very different innovations. In fact, any application of a basic concept to new areas can lead to new innovations.